Red Sea

If you spend much of any time looking around the interwebs for political news, you’ll almost certainly run across one a them post-election maps of the U.S. House of Representatives that shows vast swaths of America red and turning reddrer, while small blue pockets continue to shrink.

Now intellectually you probably realize this is meaningless. If not, here’s Dave Weigel:

Those very red maps of the new House are fun, but you can fit Manhattan into North Dakota 2094 times. And Manhattan has more people.

But there’s a tendency, which some Republicans will definitely seek to reinforce, to treat territory as somehow endowing the people who occupy it with more legitimacy than others. That this red sea of sparsely occupied land happens largely to coincide with the ancestral stomping grounds of Real Americans–you know, the folks whose votes should count more because they pay the taxes and hew to the Founders’ divinely inspired notions of absolute property rights and Zygote Personhood–is probably just a coincidence.